The drought strengthened its grip and fruit yields declined further. We talked around what to do. The freezers still had enough fruit over from our really big years to keep the jam trickling out to our retailers, but this would probably be the last season of production if the weather didn’t improve.
She said how about we spray Round Up on the lot and have an overseas trip. I disagreed. ‘Let’s expand our area and try to increase production that way. It’s not just the drought that’s wrong with our crop, we’ve got two spotted mites, black flies, white flies, rusts, root grubs and who knows what else that reduce the yield. Let’s build a new but small enclosure well away from the old one and start it with clean new stock we can multiply and use for any replantings’. She wasn’t impressed.
John needed to go into Bombala. I went along for the drive. We got to chatting about my idea for a new raspberry enclosure. There’s a sale of treated pine logs out at the mill he said. Do you want to look? I would need around 20 logs each 3 m long for what I had in mind. I had no money on me but looking wouldn’t hurt.
‘The sale finished last week’ I was informed by a disinterested yard man. Another employee pointed out there were a few of the left-overs in the adjoining paddock and they might suit my purpose. They didn’t because they were all too short but the price was right. I could always join them somehow. I could never go past a good price. We took 30 because John happened to have a fat wallet that day and the back of his tray-top ute was empty. It was travelling very low as we edged out of the paddock.
The design was going to be clever. Having to join the logs to achieve the height allowed me to factor in something missing on the old enclosure, a snow shedding system. The net over the old enclosure couldn’t carry more than a few centimetres of snow before the weight started buckling and snapping the wooden supports. Over the years I had overcome this by knocking the snow off as it fell but that was unpleasant particularly if it was at night.
I sawed off a half log section 30 cm long from one end of each pole. This allowed me to make a vertical butt joint between each pair of poles that was held together with a bolt. Each pair of poles became one long one with a central knee that bent both ways. Jane used to call that ‘emu knee’ which she got regularly. Because I used a blunt chain saw to do the work to leave a rough finish, the joints didn’t bend easily if the bolt was tight. This result was good but fortuitous; I had been too lazy to sharpen the chain. The lengthened poles were dropped into half metre long augered holes, spaced to enclose an area of 400 metres square, mesh wire was attached starting 30 cm below soil surface to keep out wombats and taken the full height of the poles, and a spider web of fencing wire fastened the tops of the poles together across the enclosed area. It was finished by running a wire outwards from the top of each pole and attaching it in a loose knot to a steel post bashed into the ground. Theoretically, in the event of heavy snow, the knees would all bend inwards because the knots would slip, and the net would gradually collapse onto the raspberry canes growing below. This would destroy the raspberries but preserve the enclosure. Luckily I had remembered to make a door into the new structure.
We went to Canberra to buy replacement canes which had to be Chilcotin. The nursery lady told us they would be coming in next month and each would be $6.50 to $7.50. I wanted 50 so that would be well over $300. This seemed tough because we threw out hundreds of canes every year and burnt them. She said they were organic and nursery people had to make a bit of money just like everybody else. Unlike the lady, Rodney was prepared to negotiate without getting angry and I got him down to $3 each as long as I would pick up the bundles as soon as they were delivered by the grower. This was an OK deal.
I planted them in the newly turned soil watched closely by a pair of robins eager to eat things I couldn’t see. Next season was going to be great.
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